Case Study: My Guest Post on the SEOmoz Blog

One of the most preached link building strategies out there is guest blogging. The exposure, traffic, and links you can get from a guest post are worth more than taking the time to write it. I can tell you all day about how great it is, but I’d rather show it. I recently guest posted over at the SEOmoz blog, and the results I got were astounding. If you’re not a guest blogging fan by the end of this, then you need to rethink whether or not you’re sane.

Here’s a graph of my referring traffic when my post got published:

At the very beginning of this graph, there’s a slight jump in referring traffic. This is when my post got promoted in the YOUmoz section (SEOmoz’s community blog area). A few days later, the traffic died down a bit, but then something happened: my post was of such high quality that it was promoted to the main blog! Yes, this is the same blog guys like Rand Fishkin & Will Critchlow are posting on. What does this mean? An insane amount of exposure. Just a day after it got promoted to the main blog, I hit nearly 400 visitors in referring traffic in one day, all from one post that took me only a couple hours to write! Not only was this a fantastic source of traffic when it was published, but it’s constantly sent traffic to my blog, even after 2+ weeks (I still get around 10-20 people a day from it).

Because this is a link building blog, I’ll show you what this meant in terms of links. First of all, I gained two highly authoritative links to my blog: one to my home page & one to my link building techniques page. Those two alone are awesome because of the page authority of the post & the domain authority of SEOmoz, but it gets even better. Because the blog is so renown, the content got syndicated 30 or 40 times, which netted me an extra 60-80 links. ALL FROM ONE GUEST POST!

When I thought I had reaped all the benefits possible, I received even more. I was barely promoting my RSS (which you NEED to subscribe to), but here’s what happened to my Feedburner stats:

The green line is the number of subscribers and the blue line is reach, which I didn’t care about because my content wasn’t recently published. I jumped from about 20 to 80 RSS subscribers from this one event. That’s 60 people that could potentially become regular visitors to my blog! Granted 80 isn’t much, I wasn’t promoting my blog whatsoever before this event, so I’m pretty happy with that number (today I’m over 100, which I’m very proud of considering how brand new this blog is & the lack of promotion I’ve engaged in!).

If it all seemed to good to be true, I also ended up getting numerous offers to do SEO for various people. If I did SEO full time, these would of added up to a very big chunk of clients, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time to bring on most of them (I brought on 2 clients because I love putting my strategies into play, seeing the results, and sharing them with you guys!). What this means is that if you’re a consultant that has a blog, a guest post like this could be the best investment you could ever make.

Why Was It So Successful?

There are four main reasons why I think the post was so successful.

1. My post was on a relevant blog

Because my guest post was on a blog that had an audience who wanted to read what I had to say, people were engaged, willing to check out my blog, and willing to share the post.

2. My post was on a popular blog

SEOmoz is one of the most authoritative SEO blogs on the web (actually, probably thee most authoritative), so when my content went live, it got thousands of eyeballs looking at my content.

3. My content was of high quality

If you’ve checked out the post, I got 71 thumbs up and one thumbs down (what a jerk!). I got almost no negative comments, and as you know, it got promoted to the main blog for a reason. The post was tweeted over 450 times, which drove a high amount of referring traffic to the post. All of this was because my blog was on a topic people wanted to know about!

4. I had an awesome byline

If you hadn’t read the line “Author Bio” right above my byline, you would have never known it was a promotional paragraph. I told people if they wanted to find out more about various link building techniques, they should go to my blog; that’s why I got almost 1,000 people over 2 weeks via the two links I posted.

Conclusion

Even more successful than I could have anticipated, my guest post sent some serious link love & traffic to my blog, all because I took the time to find a relevant & high trafficked blog to post on, create an awesome piece of content on a highly popular topic, and write an awesome byline. Guest blogging is the epitome of where links & traffic meet beautifully.

Thanks for reading! If you found my blog via my guest post on SEOmoz, please tell me in the comments why you kept coming back. If you have any other questions or comments about the guest post or about guest blogging in general, I’d love to hear them in the comments below. Please subscribe by RSS or follow Point Blank SEO on twitter!

Amazing how a little hard work pays its dividends in this industry. Yet, it still baffles me at some the self-titles “SEO’s” that still want to argue writing a legitimate article and posting it to a relevant blog in order to gain traffic and links. A lot still want to spin 20 horrible articles on 50 different article sharing sites.

That’s a great point, I haven’t talked about how my post compares to writing an article & spinning it! Think about how upset the black hat community would be if I told them it took me 1 hour to write a post that netted me 80+ links, 1,000+ referring traffic over 3 weeks, and a few job offers :). They’d rather hear about a guy who wrote & spun an article (3 hours) to get a few crappy article directory links!

Thanks Michael! Once again, I love that you find my content so interesting. I’m thinking about ways to reward you and a few other of my loyal readers, so don’t think you will go unrewarded!!

SEOmoz allows you to pull fresh data of the post. According to them, the post got roughly 9,000 pageviews.

1,000/9,000 = 11.1%.

For author bio links, I think that’s pretty solid. Most people leave the post when they realize it’s over, so by making it seem like the post isn’t over (i.e. “for more information…”), it gets a much higher CTR.

Guest posting on SEOmoz is not for everyone, but go ahead if that’s what you want to do! It’s a highly reputable blog, so getting accepted is anything but easy, so don’t set your expectations too high. I got lucky :).

Hi Jon! This is absolutely the reason that YouMoz was originally created. It’s great to see an increase in traffic, links and subscribers! Plus as you mention, as SEOs we’re always talking about how great guest blogging is. This just proves the point.

Thanks for contributing such a great post in the first place!
Jen
Community Manager at SEOmoz

@jon congrats for your success from this Guest blogging technique. I know it really works and you also posted the results of this. I am searching a best seo software or seo tool ( paid or free) which tells me the weakest pages of my site, competitor analysis and most suitable places to submit my links …